funny

Earlier this week, Samsung officially announced its Bixby-powered smart speaker - the Galaxy Home. The design is certainly interesting, as its three legs and curved frame sets it apart from most competing products. As it turns out, the Galaxy Home bears a striking resemblance to various common objects - including pots, grills, and even cow udders.

Easily the best demonstration from I/O this year was Google Duplex, an in-development feature for Assistant that will call businesses for you to set up reservations or appointments. The possibilities are quite likely endless, which has inspired some people to come up with other great uses for Duplex.

These days, many advertisements try to be truly different to stand out from the crowd and get people talking. Nokia seems to be attempting this approach with its new ad, which features a guru teaching an apartment renter about the arts of minimalism and 'Phone Shui.' In other words, Nokia is pushing its pure Android angle.

Back in May, Google Assistant added support for shortcuts, allowing you to say one thing and have Assistant perform another command. For example, I set "night" as a shortcut for starting ambient noise on my Google Home. But you can just as easily have fun with it, when combined with Assistant's 'repeat after me' command.

Google has been using CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA for years now to crowdsource information from images it has found online. On the one side, you prove to Google you're a human, on the other, Google gets humans to see small images of text from a book, numbers on a house, or various objects and animals and provide OCR for the text and numbers plus logical grouping and categorization for the objects/animals.

That's the main dig that XKCD's comic today is based on. It's a CAPTCHA but it's asking the user to say if there's a stop sign, just so it can properly use that data to control its self-driving vehicle.

Just a week ago, Spain-based phone manufacturer Doogee announced the S60, a mostly-unremarkable durable phone. The best part about the device was the accompanying press release, which was filled to the brim with hilarious spelling errors. Doogee just unveiled the 'Mix 2,' and the announcement is almost as entertaining as the S60's.

Welcome back to the Android Police Files, your #1 source for the brilliant stuff that the AP staff receives in our mailboxes. Since we last convened, a lot has happened. The latest version of Android shares a name with a branded product for the first time since 4.4 KitKat. The Galaxy Note8 was released, and it doesn't catch fire. And most recently, a Canadian 17-year old and his "youth leadership coach" tried to pass a Chinese ODM's phone off as their own and crowdsource it on Indiegogo.

There will always be new things going on in the world, but there's one thing that we know will never change: crazy people sending us crazy messages.

With most commercials in the US, companies compare their products to "the leading brand" or "competing product." But not so in the telecom industry. Carriers often go after their competitors with satirical ads and CEO rants, calling out each other on their claims and figures. Sprint is no stranger to this behavior, and has started a series of ads directly targeting Verizon.